Born Kneeling 1248


What comes out to me from the “Black Spider letter” correspondence of Prince Charles published today is how utterly obsequious Tony Blair and New Labour ministers were to him. No sign whatsoever of radicalism from the former “People’s Party” as they fell over to ingratiate themselves with the heir to the throne. I rather enjoyed Charles quite sharp tone to Blair.

I am fundamentally opposed to the existence of the monarchy. It will hopefully be replaced by a better system, but no human system is perfect. Given that we have a monarchy at present, you will perhaps be surprised to learn that I do not see anything wrong in Charles’ letters, which put forward views which are much what we would have expected him to hold. Of course there is interaction between the monarchy and government, and of course we should get rid of this hereditary element. But Charles’ lobbying is hugely less damaging and pernicious than the corporate lobbying I witnessed throughout my Whitehall career. At least Charles is not lobbying them for corporate advantage and giving large political donations at the same time.

While in my view he did nothing wrong in writing the letters, he and government are both very wrong in arguing they should be private. It is when it is secret that such attempts to wield influence between two branches of government – and monarchy is a branch of government – can be most simply perverted to ill ends. That such publication will not occur again because government has legislated to keep it secret, is an example of the privileged arrogance that prevents this from being a genuine democracy.

Altogether not that big a story and it gives Rusbridger and the Guardian the chance to pose as radical. I find the fact that what is published is so anodyne and unobjectionable rather suspicious – what has not been published? Rusbridger is of course the editor who complied enthusiastically with a GCHQ instruction to smash the Snowden hard drives. The existence of other copies does not justify this any more than it justifies book-burning.

By coincidence, a very worthwhile article by Michael Gillard that had been excised from the net has recently been republished, setting out how Rusbridger in 2002 conspired with Andy Hayman of the Met to bury an investigation into police corruption, including the burglary of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. By a further coincidence I was having a pint with Laurie Flynn in Sandy Bell’s four days ago.

Hayman went on to be the promoter of the stream of lies about the murder of Jean Charles De Menezes and the publicist of numerous fake terrorist plots, before having to resign in a scandal involving nubile police officers at public expense in tropical islands.

Rusbridger and his extraordinary wig go on and on as a pretend opposition outlet, their reputation much dented by recent hysterical unionist output which exceeds the Daily Express. But Rusbridger’s continued usefulness to the establishment is not in doubt. The pose of publishing the most harmless of Prince Charles’ letters does little to help a threadbare disguise.


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1,248 thoughts on “Born Kneeling

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  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Anyway, the presence here today of our Oxford Greatsman has reminded me that in case anyone is interested in knowing more about Classical Athenian democracy than can be gleaned from his occasional snippets I would recommend the following:

    “Greek and Roman Political Ideas” (Pelican 2014) by one Melissa Lane, who now teaches politics at Princeton and was formerly at Cambridge (the UK Cambridge).

    There are chapters on justice, constitution, democracy, virtue, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, republic and sovereignty and the work is rounded off by an interesting although rather short final chapter entitled “Futures of Greek and Roman pasts”.

    Habbabkuk recommends.

  • Really

    BTW habba – janner by pleading alzheimer may no longer be libeled in law, being regarded as a “dead” person(ality) for the purpose of libel. But its nice to see you come to the rescue of our fellow tribesman.

  • fedup

    But why are we discussing someone Craig banned from his blog ages ago?

    Pot Kettle etc.

    ROFL

    The crapfest well and truly has splattered troll residue all over the thread.

    ================

    Abe you said;

    Seriously, there aren’t going to be any Jew-only buses, because the policy trying to create them has been overturned.

    This is Israeli democracy in action and shows how Western civilisation with its capacity for self-criticism can achieve action for human rights better than Arab states.

    “…” I’ll ignore the slanderous nonsense that follows.

    Abe which democracy and for whom, are you waxing lyrical about?

    zionistan is ran under an apartheid racist regime, and you call it democracy?

    The segregation of the “Jew only” buses,
    reminiscent of the “other democratic” state produced such a negative backlash that even the US arm of the zionist 5thcolumnist could not explain away the Arab segregation, hence the scheme getting dropped soon as it made it into the wider world.

    Your comment is so out of whack and so wrong on many levels, that it would take a whole thread to pull it to bits; Civilization Western clearly implying those uncivilized “sand niggers and Arabs” incapable of any kind of a discourse ……. self criticism, just who bloody criticized the segregationist move inside zionistan? Couple of communists sitting in cafe?

    Action for human rights? Abe stop smoking whatever it is you have been partaking from, it is doing your sight no good at all, for you not to see such a shockingly wicked brutal, and cruel regime of Jewish supremacy that you so blandly endorse of too;

    (a) Annex all occupied territories and make the people there full Israeli citizens and permit Palestinian refugees to return. In short, form the fully secular state that Craig referred to. IMO it is unlikely that Israel will do this, since it would no longer be a Jewish state.

    (b) Form a viable Palestinian state in the occupied territories. This would be incompatible with stealing the best land and water for settlements. This one is possible, but difficult, as the Israeli right wing would prefer to expand settlements, not give them up.

    I’m glad that I’m not Palestinian

    Abe no tint of rose can turn the ugly face of zionisim into a champion of human rights, the stuff you have been eating/drinking/smoking is clearly some potent hallucinogen.

    Although the racist undertones of your post have not been questioned, and you have got away with it, as the rest of the trolls and their oh so pretentious residue smeared all over this thread and elsewhere.

    However there seems to a great many posts generated about somecohens clearly showing scratch the surface and there is a racist who will be using any excuse to beat upon the coloureds and sand niggers.

    So long as cohens aren’t mentioned all is well and OK isn’t it Abe?

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Really
    3:40pm 4:15pm

    I am beginning to wonder if English is your first language. If not, that may explain some of what you are saying.

    Andrew Sullivan is describing a neoCON, not a “neocohen” or a “neocoen”, whatever they are. If you mean neocon, why don’t you say neocon, instead of using two words that perfectly clearly have an anti-Semitic aspect to them?

    If you don’t, can you please explain the difference between neocon, neocohen and neocoen?

    Thanks.

    J

  • fred

    “Not changing ‘them’. Changing their ownership.”

    What does it matter what name is on a piece of paper in a vault somewhere if all else remains the same?

  • Mary

    I am not going any further Fred with this game of ping pong. Nor do I seek one of those FOADR epithets.

  • Really

    JSD – it must be the American spell checker, my bad ! But who is going to apologise to the one million Iraqi dead (and countless wounded)? All Rabbi Ovadia did was leave a blank chit in the Wailing Wall !

  • technicolour

    John SD: as Habbakuk says, that poster has been banned under several incarnations for repulsive insanity. Just so you know.

    Has anyone watched the We Are Many trailer?

  • Abe Rene

    @Fedup “OK isn’t it Abe?”

    Israel’s long-term security depends on doing justice to Palestinians. I don’t think illegal settlements would help that end. But Israeli democracy has no real counterpart in any Arab country in the sense of a country respecting its own people. Israel is a real democracy in that sense, and can exert a good influence. The real problem with occupying the West Bank illegally is that it prevents Israel’s light shining as effectively as it should. For example, how many people know about the free treatment given by Israeli hospitals to people from surrounding Arab countries? Here’s what I am talking about:
    http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/01/world/israeli-broadcast-doctor-is-a-radio-bridge-to-arabs.html

  • Mary

    ‘how many people know about the free treatment given by Israeli hospitals to people from surrounding Arab countries?’

    Amy ‘treatment’ offered to the victims of Operation Summer Rains, Cast Lead, Protective Edge, Pillar of Defence, etc etc?

  • David McDowell

    I don’t mind Charles having a say about politics and no doubt he will have a say whether I like it or not.
    I’d just like them to stop peddling the self-serving lie that the royals are “above politics” and “don’t interfere in politics”.
    They’ve been spoon feeding that BS to us peasants for decades – most recently exposed by the Queen’s “advice” to the Scots before the independence referendum: “think very carefully”. But, of course, she wasn’t “interfering in politics” – absolutely not! Just how stupid do they think we are?

  • fedup

    Israel’s long-term security depends on doing justice to Palestinians. I don’t think illegal settlements would help that end. But Israeli democracy has no real counterpart in any Arab country in the sense of a country respecting its own people. Israel is a real democracy in that sense, and can exert a good influence. The real problem with occupying the West Bank illegally is that it prevents Israel’s light shining as effectively as it should. For example, how many people know about the free treatment given by Israeli hospitals to people from surrounding Arab countries? Here’s what I am talking about:

    Abe feed a man once he will go hungry again, teach a man how to hunt/fish/sow he will never go hungry. On one hand your so called “democracy” has been in the incubator, and life support for the last seventy years and as yet, if it were not for the huge amounts of money, arms, and weird and wonderful round the robin contracts that place would be dead in six months! This shitty little strip of land has been on the make for seventy years and perching atop the mountains of bones has been admonishing the world for its wrongs and then gone on to get free submarines, free fighter jets, free ammunition free bombs, free hardware and oodles of grants from the tax funds of EU, UK, US citizenry, all in the way of making amends!

    On the other hand Arabs that you so disdainfully believe cannot organize a knees up in a brewery, or boil a kettle of water, have been at every juncture palmed off with some despotic charge hand who is picked based on their oath of allegiance to all things Western, and no concern for the people they will be in charge of. Saddam, Gaddafi (before they turned and started to govern their people), Mubarak, Al Saud,………… These despots would not survive a day without the comprehensive support of the Western mafia whose SIS is leading the fight against any kind of resistance or dissent within those benighted lands.

    Abe the shining example is as shinning as shit on the barn door, you really must lay off the stuff they are feeding you; these hallucinogens have destroyed your soul and you no longer can see the wood for the trees.

    Abe the Arabs are no different to the Jews of the 19th and early twentieth century. Fact is the Jews are now become white and Muslims are the niggers/coloureds! Your undying support for the current arrangements are only perpetuating more deaths and destitution, ask yourself why should man be pitted against man? Other than the devil and the banksters who else can profit from such an arrangement?

    Abe cases and desist from supporting mass murder land theft racism and injustice. Abe you were asking people to start spying on one another for “bitterness” and inform the authorities, can you see how low you have sunk, or has still not dawned on yet?

  • Phil

    Hababakuk
    “What reasons do you have for thinking that the template you advance is so transposable?”

    I don’t. It is not a template at all. As I said:

    “Obviously hunter gathers do not offer a template for anarchism but they do disprove any argument that people are not capable of egalitarianism.”

  • lysias

    I’ve finished reading Smile for the Camera on Cyril Smith, and here are a few interesting paragraphs toward the end of the book (Sorry, I read it on Kindle, and so don’t have page references):

    I sat back and slowly took in what I’d just heard. Another officer, Mike Smith, had previously told me he’s investigated Cyril Smith in the 1950s after they’d heard reports of boys going back into the back of his newsagent’s. Now I knew he’d been investigated as recently as 1999. For well over forty years the police had pursued Cyril. How could he possibly be investigated for so long and never be charged?
    It seemed lots of people knew what Cyril was up to and all the signs indicated that this went right to the top. It soon emerged on BBC’s Newsnight that Cyril had been arrested in the early 1980s after police had caught him on camera abusing fourteen-year-old boys at a flat in Lambeth. Incredibly, he was able to walk free again. A duty sergeant who wanted to keep him in custody was reprimanded; officers were forced to hand over all their evidence and were warned to keep quiet about their investigation or face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.
    The dam was now beginning to burst, and more and more stories like this were being told. Police officers even called a radio phone-in to talk about how investigations into child abuse featuring Cyril Smith were stopped by bosses just as they were about to make arrests. As more official documents began to enter the public domain, we suddenly discovered that the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been personally informed that police had investigated Cyril’s abuse of boys before she awarded him a knighthood in 1988. In documents that the Cabinet Office tried to suppress, newspapers revealed that Thatcher had been explicitly warned that awarding Smith a knighthood could damage the integrity of the honours system. Incredibly, she ignored these warnings and went ahead and knighted him.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Fedup

    “I’m glad that I’m not Palestinian”

    _______________________

    Most Palestinians would probably be glad you’re not Palestinian.

  • Phil

    Technicolour
    “Has anyone watched the We Are Many trailer?”

    For some reason my pc is refusing to play it. Keeps reloading, changing quality settings. I read the gumph though and this made me laugh:

    “with John Le Carre, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Danny Glover, Mark Rylance, Richard Branson, Hans Blix and Ken Loach amongst others, it charts the birth and rise of the people power movements that are now sweeping the world”

    People power presented by rich white male celebrities, some rich white male pricks and other rich white male people. They could have included Stacey Dooley for diversity.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    David McDowell

    “They’ve been spoon feeding that BS to us peasants for decades – most recently exposed by the Queen’s “advice” to the Scots before the independence referendum: “think very carefully”.”

    _______________________

    I should imagine that a lot of people think very carefully before voting in a bog-standard local election. Or general election. Or even on where they might take their next summer holiday.

    What, then, is wrong with the Head of State of the UK – and of Scotland – advising Scottish people to think very carefully about how they will vote in a referendum on the independence of their country?

    I think YOU should think very carefully before posting (tripe).

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Really
    21/05/2015 4:54pm 5:18pm

    Is “jewboy Abe” the result of your spellchecker, too?

    J

  • RobG

    This one’s for Habba @ Co. and it’s on Press TV! (the Iranian government news channel in English). OH MY GOD, IT’S THE END OF CIVILISATION!!!

    British MP George Galloway On Nuclear Weapons
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxwcGnehliY

    (and for the record, the Hiroshima bomb was uranium fueled, and the Nagasaki bomb was plutonium fueled; and the first ever explosion of a nuclear bomb occurred one month before, July 1945, in the New Mexico desert, and it was a uranium bomb)

  • doug scorgie

    I went into an Italian restaurant the other day. I asked the waiter if they had any Jews on the menu.

    He looked at me and said; yes sir.

    We have orange Jews; Grapefruit Jews and blackcurrant Jews.

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Doug Scorgie
    21/05/2015 8:16pm

    That’s remarkably tactless and not at all funny, particularly on this thread.

    J

  • Really

    JSD-I dont know what lies behind your name, but if some of this turkic khazar rubbish thinks it is chosen and we cattle are dumb enough to swallow the kind of rubbish Abe was “narrating” – a swift sharp reminder is needed to stop evil in its tracks. Savvy?

    As you may still be an unaware Friesian, an eye-opener for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4OXmO3T2vc

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    John Spencer-Davis

    “As you may still be an unaware Friesian,”

    ___________________

    That, for your information, is Really’s shorthand for goyim cattle.

    *********************

    Note 1 – no need to thank me, John, just keep pretending I’m not here 🙂

    Note 2 – MODS, are you all asleep?

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Really
    21/05/2015 8:35pm

    I don’t know what lies behind your name, either. I don’t even know what that means, and I don’t really want to know.

    I think I have a fairly good notion of what lies behind your remarks, however.

    You can express opposition to people who are supportive of the Israeli state and its policies without referring to them as “neocohens” and “jewboys”.

    My preference would be that you do not bother to reply.

    J

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    15h20 : “I have nearly finished reading Simon Danczuk’s Smile for the Camera”

    19h17 : “I’ve finished reading Smile for the Camera on Cyril Smith”

    _____________________________

    A fascinating blow-by-blow account in real time. What did you have for lunch and will you go out for a walk this afternoon?

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    RobG

    “This one’s for Habba @ Co. and it’s on Press TV! (the Iranian government news channel in English). OH MY GOD, IT’S THE END OF CIVILISATION!!!

    British MP George Galloway On Nuclear Weapons
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxwcGnehliY
    _______________

    To read: British former-MP George Galloway.

    The upside is that he’ll be able to earn his £300000 p.a. without Mary calling him a trougher.

    🙂

  • Really

    JSD-so are you with us and Jesus, or are you also waiting for molioch, like habba and satanyahu?

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